“Meet My Madness” – Animated Short Movie

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After Effects offers the possibility to show own works and contents through an innovative animated way, we can observe an example in the figurative arts. This case is about the Andrea Aste’s total opera, he’s painter, illustrator, an eclectic artist. The strong explosive charge of creativeness, mixed to madness and elegance, characterizing his illustration, is the core of this project: it was necessary transpose all these elements into a composition of few minutes.
The protagonist suggested by Andrea is nothing less than a copy of himself, a misterious character who escapes from the gray claws of his city. During his run away, he’s carried on by various events in the fantastic worlds of his mind.
A romantic hero animated by a rebel soul, who fights with brush shoots and color palette. The project is really exciting, but it hides a complexity: we must come into the imaginary world created by the artist to bring to the life his fantasy, exclusively using his personal files archive to create screenplay, storyboard and animation movie.

In this picture we can see two character, the hero and the bad man: every parts of them is unlinked by the body to have an autonomos set on a single layer. A design like this allows to create a body structure useful to manage the animation effectively. Importing the Photoshop file on AE we get the same subdivision already created. It’s the most important issue to create a realistic animation on a simulated tridimensionality.

Now we can assign an anchor point to every layers; around this point we can set the basic transformations: position, rotation, scale. Here we can see the corrispondences for each element and the relative anchor point:
– Head → Neck
– Body → Belly button
– Arm → Shoulder
– Forearm → Elbow
– Hand → Wrist
– Leg → Hip
– Calf → Knee
– Foot → Ankle

Before to start with the animation model, we have to set the hierarchy states of character body: in this way the transformations on a “father” layer affects the layer below.

The character run in this animated short movie is been made through the use of LoopOut expression: the best way to define a repeated cycle in few keyframes. If we want a simple movement in a loop, it’s enough to set 3 keyframes, but to increase realism fluidity we need more point of movement.